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Artist takes control of her life task by task, bead by bead By MARY LOUISE SCHUMACHER mschumacher@journalsentinel.com Posted: March 3, 2007 Crossing something from a "to do" list has a certain satisfaction. We may not know if or how global warming will hurl the planet into another ice age or whether there is a God. We may not be able to survive a disease we'll be diagnosed with someday or find a soul mate before our inevitable demise. But, darn it, those dishes are done and that checkbook is balanced. We have control over something. While many of us may preoccupy ourselves with the incidentals of everyday life to avoid the larger questions of our existence, visual artist Anne Kingsbury exhumes meaning from the minutiae, the heaps of seemingly inessential tasks she faces day to day. For her, so much of our existence is in the "fangs and face" moments, as she likes to call her routine of brushing her teeth and washing her face. Like sliced bananas suspended in Jell-O, the vital stuff of life would just lie around and go brown and mushy without the gelatin effect of the in-between stuff. It is the times of taking out the garbage, of washing and braiding her hair, of dusting and of peeling apples that form the "little building blocks" that hold everything up and in place. This is what Kingsbury's world view - her days, weeks and months - looks like from the pages of journals covering 30 or so years of her life. The pages are artworks in their own right and make up the conceptual center of "Repetition and Discipline," an exhibit of Kingsbury's work now on view at Woodland Pattern Book Center (in collaboration with the Peltz Gallery) that includes facsimiles of the pages, meticulously beaded versions of the journals and some of the elaborate stoneware, crocheted, leather and quilted works that Kingsbury is known for, as well. A patchwork of soft, block-like shapes blankets the journal pages and sidles up to and around drawings of figures or faces, notes and sketches for possible artworks, chocolate mousse recipes and pinochle scores. Each patch is dated and filled with colorful strings of text, bending gently this way and that in parcels, like waves of unseen energy. As many as a month's worth of days are held on the pages, which, for all their beauty, list the repeating, simple tasks of daily life with enough frequency to give one existential pause: "October 19, 1980 15 min - wash hairs 10 min - get dressed 20 min - clean kitchen 30 min - sew box lid 10 min - comb hairs, fangs 20 min - start soup . . . " The lists did not start out as art at all. They were, in fact, something that occupied Kingsbury's hands at a time when she was both depressed and lamenting a lack of time for art-making. In the late 1970s, her then-new responsibilities as executive director of Woodland Pattern, a title she still holds, were eclipsing her identity as a visual artist. She had delivered a stillborn son during that time and had also been denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. When a nagging sense of hesitation to do certain things set in, she found a way to coax herself beyond her feelings of dread: She'd use an egg timer as a promise to stop. "I am a procrastinator and I'm known for being slow," says Kingsbury, who's likened herself to a child refusing to do chores on a Saturday morning. "I decided if I set the timer and wrote down what I was going to do, that when the timer went off, I could stop doing it." The cumulative currents of lines and lists then represent more than things accomplished. They represent the small, heroic moments familiar to anyone who's known the bane of depression or a certain personal fragility. They also represent a beautiful resilience - in facing things, in a tendency to be artful in spite of oneself and in a determination to create successes even while fearfully avoiding the possibilities of failing. The bing of the egg timer is an assured victory that keeps the larger issues of failure or success at bay, after all. And overcoming the hurdles also becomes a physical feat, a tangible accomplishment to hang onto, literally, first in the expressive journal pages themselves and later in the beaded artworks. An initial 15 minutes spent paying bills on one day, for example, is honored by the additional time taken to write it into a list and then, perhaps years later, again by painstakingly stitching bead after bead to make the shapes of those words - 1-5-m-i-n-u-t-e-s-p-a-y-b-i-l-l-s. Hanging together in an exhibit, the pages and beaded pieces - and even an unfinished piece, a full deer hide she's been beading off and on for a decade - take what's personally tangible for Kingsbury and make it public. We, in turn, honor Kingsbury's work ethic and vulnerability by taking the time to look and to understand. The act of beading What also repeats in Kingsbury's work, of course, is the act of beading itself. Like the soothing action of fingering prayer beads, Kingsbury puts one bead down after another in the same way that she lives and works, idea by idea, task by task, egg-timer bing to egg-timer bing. Flesh-colored beads, rounded but with flat ends, are lined up like little tubes and splay out to create an octopus-like hand that covers the face of a figure in one beaded page. Kingsbury outfits her figure in all-white footed pajamas and uses loose bands of beads, creating the feel of flexible fabric. But, like the pajamas' comforting enclosure of tiny toes, the figure's face is also closed up inside the garment. Her eyes are just two round knots of strung-together black beads. "People have asked me, 'So what's with her anyway?' " Kingsbury says of the figure. "She's just a little person . . . and she is very shy." Kingsbury had been thinking about fruit bats from Central America when she first drew the figure on a journal page, she says. The bats have giant ears that they use to cover their faces. "So I was thinking this little figure has her little cover on and she feels safe but she is still dealing with 'things to face' and 'having to face things,' " Kingsbury says, pointing to the words in the piece. It can take four hours to create a single square inch of this low-relief, beaded texture. The lines of beads are reminiscent of both writing and drawing. The words, one carefully placed after another, are an obvious reflection of the poetry sitting on the shelves at Woodland Pattern. The large deerskin artwork is pinned to the wall with push pins, and threads hang loose over the in-progress piece, which will eventually hold a passage from every year from 1979 forward, she says. While the other journal page artworks are a record of a year, the deer hide is a record of a life, or at least a large portion of one. It is inspired, in part, by an Indian tradition called the "winter count," which is a record of a tribe over a period of time made from symbols. The mortar holding the blocks of lists together in this piece consists of the newly created, beaded drawings of a magical, torso-less chicken with striped socks and roller skates, a flying, pajama-clad child, a fish with a human face and a lizard perched on the long tongue of another figure, among other things. "I'm mining this material for use with all of the experience and information that I've gathered since it was put down," Kingsbury says. "I'll probably continue to do that. It is a never-ending source." |